(Forgive me if today’s reviews of my three favorite albums of 2008 aren’t among the best pieces of criticism ever posted here.  But I’m morbidly hungover after hitting the Zinfandel too hard at last night’s Daily Dose Christmas party, I’m writing this at six thirty in the morning, and also there’s a monsoon outside that for some reason keeps making my doorbell ring.)

3.
Portishead
Third
Mercury Records

Back in the nineties, spies were cool.  The Cold War was over, and espionage was chic.  Portishead, coming out of the same gloomy seaside city as Tricky and Massive Attack, saw the appeal and transferred spy music onto bleak electronics, fitfully scratching records and making love songs like All Mine (from their second album) sound like epic struggles that could alter the fate of the universe.  (Also, best video ever.)

Nowadays, espionage is more likely to remind people of nasty things like waterboarding.  Even James Bond isn’t quite as carefree as he used to be.  And so, like record scratching, songs like Sour Times now seem like artifacts from distant, more stylish era.

So when Portishead announced via charmingly misspelled Myspace bulletins that they were working on new material, I was briefly afraid it would sound badly dated, like a group of old-timers trying to recapture decade-old success.  Certainly, making fans wait over a decade for new material can lead to impossibly high expectations.  But when the trio started posting demos on their Myspace, I was ecstatic.  These songs were different.  Weird.  Special.

Beginning with a Portuguese spoken intro by Claudio Campos (a Capoeira instructor explaining something about the rules of three), the album soon rushes into Silence, an unusually percussive song that builds for two minutes before letting you hear vocalist Beth Gibbons, who is (thankfully) funereal-sounding as ever.

Songs build and build and then end abruptly.  Lyrics and song titles are vague as ever, but this album has unexpected sonic diversity.  Deep Water is a folk song with male backup singers, and Magic Doors mixes programming with a hurdy-gurdy.  The Rip starts out folky but doesn’t end that way, and Machine Gun mixes a harsh Blue Monday-ish beat with sounds that could be from a 1983 fantasy movie.

My favorite song, today anyway, is Nylon Smile, a haunting, gloomy breakup number.  “I never had a chance,” Gibbons says at the end of it, the music cutting out beneath her, “to explain exactly what I meant.”

Ever cinematic, a short film for single Magic Doors is currently screening in theaters around the UK this month.

Watch! Portishead, Machine Gun

Portishead, The Rip

Tags: albums of the year, portishead

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